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THE ZOO WHERE YOU'RE FED TO GOD

Name: THE ZOO WHERE YOU'RE FED TO GOD
Author: Michael Ventura
ISBN: 0-671-89222-3

by Michael Ventura ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1994

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Dr. Dolittle meets Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a father and son show signs of mental breakdown, and zoo animals talk. Everyone in his Brooklyn tenement expected James to enter the priesthood, but during high school, recognizing that he was too proud to pray, he settled for the next most respected career and became a surgeon. Now he's divorced, his 11-year-old son, Eddie, doesn't want to speak to him, and he's losing touch with reality. One afternoon he goes to the zoo and begins to hear voices like those he heard as a child—except that then they just called his name as he was falling asleep, and now a tiger offers pseudo- profound daylight advice like ``Take the help that's offered, or be lost.'' James thinks he may be going insane and doesn't find it an altogether unpleasant idea, until he learns that Eddie is also hearing voices. Dad wants to set an example, tell his son that he experienced the same thing when he was young, and prove that one can survive it. But James's current experiences—talking to tigers, becoming one with a giraffe's beauty, reciting Revelations to a two-headed snake—are so frightening that he feels he must pretend they're not happening in order to protect Eddie. Then he meets another zoo ``weirdo,'' a young woman who sings folk songs to the caged, and she offers James a way to make sense of his life. Ventura, who wrote the screenplay for Echo Park, destroys a promising concept and some dreamy detail by overloading his first novel with a great deal of clunky, overdrawn material about God, Paradise, the Bible, and the idea that all things are possible. It's hard to believe that the inner workings of a man who's losing it can be so dull. Lions and tigers and bears...oh, yawn.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-671-89222-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.